With the widespread acceptance of Internet video, Video on Demand (VoD) systems have gained immense popularity. VoD provides subscribers choice while viewing content. The traditional means of transmission of video content are broadcast based systems, where the choice of the content is largely determined by content service providers, content telecast time, and audience viewing patterns. With the vast volume of content, it often becomes a challenge for a subscriber to decide which content would suit their taste. Hence content curation (involving discovery, gathering and presenting the content) is a field with tremendous growth potential. Some of the widely applied content curation techniques are search engines, recommendation engines.
Though various search algorithms are available for content selection, the search results often do not yield the desired content that the subscriber is looking for. On many occasions, the subscribers might not be looking for specific content but might be interested in similar content. This is where recommendation engines score over the search engines, by expanding the horizon of the subscriber's choice.
Various recommendation engines are designed which make the task of choosing a content easier and more relevant. Largely, these recommendations are based on the following—                User's viewing history        User's search parameters        From the content recorded, finding patterns of subscriber's choice.        Social Analytics—Information (Individual/Group preferences, Activities) gathered through social graphs from social networking sites (FACEBOOK®, TWITTER®, GOOGLE+®)        Analyzing data from various content review based sites (ROTTEN TOMATOES®, IMDB®)        Promotional content (like offer campaigns, discount offers, content trailers, movie special)        
The most widely adopted infrastructure for content streaming is the hierarchical caching system (follows Distributed Architecture). When a subscriber selects content to view, the request is first looked up in the cache node (closest to the user node), if the content is readily available; it is streamed to the subscriber.
However, when the content is not available via the closest cached node, it forwards the request to its parent node to service the request (or to a node higher up in the hierarchy, if the request is not serviced by the parent node). The content is then streamed from the parent node to the subscriber, through the edge node and the leaf node, caching this content for future usage. In case of a server node transmitting the video, turnaround time of the transmission is higher, and also more network bandwidth is used.
The present disclosure provides an enhanced recommendation system for VoD which uses lesser network bandwidth.